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I've been lurking in the shadows eagerly anticipating the release of the 5.5.x kexploit in the hopes of being able to learn how to do one very specific thing, mod Nintendo Land - particularly Luigi's Ghost Mansion and Mario Chase.

Our 3-year old son absolutely loves this game and refuses to play much else, so my hope is to be able to change it up a bit to keep things fresh for him and our family.

That said, I really have no idea where to begin but am definitely willing to take the time to learn how to do it. A few things that I'd like to accomplish are:

Mario Chase:

- Get rid of those dumb robot Yoshi's in 2-player mode!
- Add different levels (maybe even reuse some levels from other games within Nintendo Land - like Animal Crossing)
- Model swap Mario with Luigi (The Better Bro™, according to our son)

If any of the community modders/developers can point me in the right direction on how to make this happen I would be greatly appreciative. Anything from how to unpack the game files, how to identify them, and how to ultimately modify them - tools/process/etc. If someone would like to help me actually do it (and letting me know how they did it) I might even be able to buy you a pizza for your troubles.

Of course once I manage to do all of these things I'd be more than happy to share with everyone assuming it's any good.

I'm 100% in for wanting something like a map editor for Mario Chase or any of the multiplayer games. They're quick, mindless entertainment in a party situation.

Assuming you have a decrypted WUD, "Loadiine Ready2Play" version, or dumped the game yourself (all 3 methods should contain the same code/content/meta folders and files):

NWPlayer123's WiiUTools (SARCTools) will allow you to decrypt the SZS archives if they are YAZ0 compressed, open them, and repack them with or without YAZ0 (will need yaz0enc if it requires compression).celcodioc's WiiUExplorer will allow you to quickly decompress/open and view the files inside a SZS archive if you're just poking around. Unfortunately, you can't repack with compression (Quick Pack in Tools menu?). Maybe @celcodioc will still add it at some point. Or maybe @NWPlayer123 or someone will make a GUI for SARCTools.

Thanks for your input @fiveighteen! I didn't want to post anything else until I had spent some time poking around the filesystem to see what's what. Unfortunately I'm at my wits end with this now. So here's where I'm at:

Since there's no real documentation on this specific game I've relied on guides for others, most heavily the Mario Kart 8 Modding Central thread.

My first effort was to try to change Mario in Mario Chase to Luigi. I eventually discovered that I could use Uwizard to Decompress and Extract the Mro_Cmn.pack file inside content>common>package which are apparently SARC compressed (correct me if I'm saying something wrong)? Once extracted there were more folders to go through. I found the Mario textures (for Mario Chase) inside the model folder as Mro_Mario.szs.

I was able to extract this again using Uwizard ("Decompress SZS") which then gave me gsys.bfres and two other files. Using TexHaxU I was able to extract the textures. I was happy to see that Nintendo simply re-used the model/texture from Luigi's Ghost Mansion (in fact, the texture name for his body is lig_luigibody.1.dds, which can also be found when in the other game's SZS). This meant I could just use the .dds file from LGM named lig_luigibody.0.dds by renaming it (right?). I went through the process of "Getting them to work" from the MK8 thread and everything looked like it went smoothly. Just to be sure I extracted the gsys.bfres file again and confirmed the green texture had been put in place of the red.

------Now here's where things seem to be going wrong for me and where I need additional help. ------

I dragged the three files (gsys.bfres, SealShadow.sms, and SealShadow.sms) into yaz0enc to give me the Mro_Mario.szs file. This file I then put into the common>model folder of Mro_Cmn.pack and used Uwizard to "Pack and Compress SARC" - the resulting file I renamed to Mro_Cmn.pack. This file I then put into the game folder under "updates>v99>content>common>package" which allowed me substitute the file with Loadiine GX2. The game loads up fine and I can get all the way to Mario Chase and select the number of players, the players themselves, and the level. However once the level begins to load (where it shows the Wii U GamePad controls) it will pop up an SD card error asking me to remove the SD card and restart.

Just to be sure the dump worked correctly I took the update off and allowed it to load normally and the game worked just fine (using its original textures) - so it's not that. My question is what might I be doing wrong?

I thought that maybe because I was using the wrong tool when creating the .pack file I'd skip that part so I messed around with the level textures itself which is located in content>common>model and named Mro_Field02.szs. I changed a few textures around and re-encoded it as an szs, created another updates folder and placed it in the proper place. When trying to load the game again though, it freezes at the same screen (but without an SD card error) and just hangs there.

I hope someone out there can point me in the right direction. This has been a lot of fun learning and is all new to me - the trouble is I can only spend a handful of time on this so troubleshooting becomes difficult. The less time I need to spend on that the more time I can spend creating custom textures so the kids and I can play with them.

Thanks again to anyone who has taken the time to read this wall of text. I know @NWPlayer123 has spent some time changing text around in Nintendo Land, so if you or anyone else could help me out that'd be greatly appreciated!

Oh, yeah, I had lots of fun ("fun") trying to poke at Nintendo Land, most of my file edits crashed and it's been over a year since I did anything with it so I'd have to pick it back up

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Thank you!

Is Nintendo Land a bit unique in that it appears to be multiple games within games? I was hoping to find a .byaml file to mess around with to see if I could just object-swap things but I'd have to hunt it down since it's not in the "generic" location like MK8. They're probably in each of the .pack files with my luck, which means more headaches for me.

Is Nintendo Land a bit unique in that it appears to be multiple games within games? I was hoping to find a .byaml file to mess around with to see if I could just object-swap things but I'd have to hunt it down since it's not in the "generic" location like MK8. They're probably in each of the .pack files with my luck, which means more headaches for me.

Thanks again for your help!

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IIRC it's like most other games, standard .pack/.sarc files and you kinda gotta do process of elimination, I also remember it being very messy compared to later games, couldn't really find anything when I tried, pretty sure that text edit was what I used to test v0.1 of SARCPack and SARCExtract, I'll look into a GUI some time, gonna go rip a new copy of Nintendo Land right now and see what I can do now that tools have improved

IIRC it's like most other games, standard .pack/.sarc files and you kinda gotta do process of elimination, I also remember it being very messy compared to later games, couldn't really find anything when I tried, pretty sure that text edit was what I used to test v0.1 of SARCPack and SARCExtract, I'll look into a GUI some time, gonna go rip a new copy of Nintendo Land right now and see what I can do now that tools have improved

Have you had any luck so far? I plan on getting started documenting what files are where so that I or anyone else can reference it in the future, going through each folder and .szs/.pack.

Also, I haven't been able to find any BYAML file - are these common in Nintendo-published Wii U games or only certain ones have it? Is there a different file type I should look for that could serve the same purpose?

Have you had any luck so far? I plan on getting started documenting what files are where so that I or anyone else can reference it in the future, going through each folder and .szs/.pack.

Also, I haven't been able to find any BYAML file - are these common in Nintendo-published Wii U games or only certain ones have it? Is there a different file type I should look for that could serve the same purpose?

Thanks!

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At this point they're called .byml, I saw a few, you can tell cause the first 4 bytes are BY\x00\x01, there's some in those map archives, they also had some weird extensions too, .fmp or smth but they're still byaml same as .pack is a sarc

At this point they're called .byml, I saw a few, you can tell cause the first 4 bytes are BY\x00\x01, there's some in those map archives, they also had some weird extensions too, .fmp or smth but they're still byaml same as .pack is a sarc

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Excellent! I'll have to take a look at these soon - I assume I could use the same tool to convert them to XML (YamlConv.exe)?

Sorry for the possibly dumb question, but how do you go about checking the files to see what's in them/see the first 4 bytes to help identify it?

I appreciate you taking the time to help and guide me through this. I tried packing a few more edits but it still won't take in-game. Alas.

can anyone help me
i have successfully got loadiine and hombrew to launch but i want to play nintendo wii games as well as wiiu games is there an app for hombrew or somthing apart from smash hack in the vwii

can anyone help me
i have successfully got loadiine and hombrew to launch but i want to play nintendo wii games as well as wiiu games is there an app for hombrew or somthing apart from smash hack in the vwii

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There is a search bar you know?
Also off-topic.

Anyways, I can see Nintendo Land modding be really awesome. Maybe a level maker in DK Crash Course?

At this point they're called .byml, I saw a few, you can tell cause the first 4 bytes are BY\x00\x01, there's some in those map archives, they also had some weird extensions too, .fmp or smth but they're still byaml same as .pack is a sarc

can anyone help me
i have successfully got loadiine and hombrew to launch but i want to play nintendo wii games as well as wiiu games is there an app for hombrew or somthing apart from smash hack in the vwii

Hmm. Definitely the first I have heard of Nintendo Land modding. Maybe there's a way to change the extracted game files? I know it's possible, I'm just not feeling like I really want to...

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Nintendo Land was the first game we/I ever modding, it's what I developed sarcextract/sarcpack v1 with, but I haven't had much motivation with making better tools, slowly working on some BFRES stuff and then I'll probably move onto a GUI for SARCTools

Nintendo Land was the first game we/I ever modding, it's what I developed sarcextract/sarcpack v1 with, but I haven't had much motivation with making better tools, slowly working on some BFRES stuff and then I'll probably move onto a GUI for SARCTools